Journalists must overcome their reticence to report on suicide – now more than ever
For a long time, suicide chilled newsrooms. The fear was simple: reporting suicide would inspire more. Maybe a celebrity’s death aroused unhelpfully lurid coverage, but usually the fear prevailed.
In the psychological literature, it became known as “the Werther effect”. In newsrooms it was known as copycat suicide. The threat isn’t illusory. Years of research suggest the reception of certain types of reporting, by certain vulnerable populations, can increase localised suicide rates – nearly 250 years after Goethe’s first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was banned in some European countries after a spate of imitative suicides.
But the fear calcified. It became rigid, unthinking, categorical. Ignoring suicide hardened its stigma, and disowned journalism’s power to mitigate it. In 2010, Austrian scholars coined the “Papageno effect”, named for the protagonist of Mozart’s Magic Flute who plans his suicide but is dissuaded by benevolent spirits who offer alternatives, in a paper that found evidence for journalism’s benefit.
The findings didn’t negate those supporting the Werther effect. It simply found that “the impact of suicide reporting may not be restricted to harmful effects; rather, coverage of positive coping in adverse circumstances, as covered in media items about suicidal ideation, may have protective effects.”
It’s not either/or. A balance should be struck between these two poles – between the potentially awful and potentially life-saving influence of the media. Recognising that the media had deferred too heavily to one side, in 2011 the Australian Press Council (APC) revised its standards on the reporting of suicide. “The new standards emphasise that general reporting and comment on issues relating to suicide can be of substantial public benefit,” the council president said. “There should not be a taboo on reporting of this kind.”
The Age editorialised: “The taboo against reporting suicide has been lifted in extensive new guidelines released to the print media today by the Australian Press Council. The journalistic euphemism for suicide – ‘police said there were no suspicious circumstances’ – may fade away now that the new guidelines acknowledge that reporting suicide can be of public benefit.”
The euphemism didn’t fade away, but some memory of the revised standards did. While reaffirming the cardinal rules for reporting suicide – don’t glamorise, trivialise or speculate, and avoid explicitly detailing the method – the intention of the new standards was to encourage more reporting, not less.
The chairman of Suicide Prevention Australia agreed. After the release of the new guidelines, he said that the fear of suicide contagion “has tilted the balance too far in the direction of silencing the media”.
So I was surprised to hear, after the recent suicide of ex-Hawthorn player Shane Tuck, journalists wonder aloud if their profession might better, and more directly, report on suicide – as if this was a fresh revelation. It’s not, but apparently the point still needs to be made. The Victorian coroner, John Cain, thinks so: just last month he said the media is unhelpfully vague on suicide, and that being more direct would offer the public a “proper understanding of the risks, what to do, and how to help people who are struggling”.
Some of the media’s indirectness can be attributed to a family’s reluctance to publicise the cause of death. Their privacy should, obviously, be respected, a fact codified by the APC’s standards which stipulate that a journalist should obtain the family’s “informed consent” before reporting.
Similarly, a survivor of a suicide attempt should not feel compelled to publicise the facts of it. Sometimes, usually in relation to celebrities, this means that the public record is comprised of strangely dislocated facts, ones easily joined in the reader’s mind but never formally connected by the press.
But the issue of privacy doesn’t account for all of the media’s indirectness. Many families are willing, often passionately, to share details with journalists. Which makes reporting a question of willingness and understanding – and also a practical matter of time and space. A short, hurried news piece might be incapable of offering the thoughtful, constructive contextualisation recommended by mental health experts that, say, a feature-length piece might.
Regardless, the old reticence about reporting suicide seems even stranger in 2020, when social media is a near-ubiquitous source of detail and speculation. This might further compel the media to increase its reporting as a thoughtful counterpoint.
This reticence isn’t unique to the newsroom. A version of it exists inside many of us. It’s the fear of directly confronting someone we love, someone we think might be at risk of suicide. The fear that the suggestibility of that person is vastly greater than the power of compassionately blunt intervention.
So, please note that experts advise those concerned about someone’s welfare to ask, directly and without judgment: “Are you thinking about suicide?” This question doesn’t make someone suicidal. Instead, it can make the person who is at risk feel relieved that the subject’s been explicitly broached.
Some bald facts: suicide is the leading cause of death for Australians aged between 15 and 44. In 2018, the median age of a person who died from suicide was 44.4 years old, “considerably lower than any of the other top 20 leading causes of death”, the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us. Which helps explains their calculation that, in the same year, suicide cost more than 105,000 years of potential life.
Pause on that.
Less calculable is the suffering these deaths cause. Suffering that is black, life-warping and a significant factor in future suicide. And all this was true before the profoundly strange and damaging consequences of the pandemic.
Earlier this year, the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre published the findings of their suicide research. Subsequently, a media statement was jointly released by the centre’s co-director, Professor Ian Hickie, then president of the Australian Medical Association Dr Tony Bartone, and former Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry, who is professor of youth mental health at the University of Melbourne. It said: “We are facing a situation where between an extra 750 and 1,500 more suicides may occur annually, in addition to the 3,000-plus lives that are lost to suicide already every year. Furthermore, this tragically higher rate is likely to persist for up to five years if the economic downturn lasts more than 12 months. Such a death rate is likely at this stage to overshadow the number of deaths in Australia directly attributable from to Covid-19 infection.”
Related: ‘Horrific’ level of stigma: biggest barrier to suicide prevention is discrimination
This statement was issued on 7 May, a relatively blissful time when we quietly congratulated ourselves and plausibly dreamt of viral elimination and travel to New Zealand. A time before Melbourne’s vertiginous outbreak and second (and third) lockdown; before New South Wales held its breath; before ministers wept on camera, and before the hope of a straight path back to normalcy was dashed for millions.
It’s hard to overstate the pandemic’s impact upon mental health. It’s also hard to scrutinise health policy, engender urgency or educate the public, if the media anxiously self-censors. I agree with McGorry when he tells me the media is less timid now – in fact, McGorry is more likely to disagree with the cautiousness of his peers, rather than the media. I’m just not sure it’s enough. Not when these discussions recur.
Ultimately, everyone thinking about this agrees on the same thing: that language matters. But we are not resolved on how, exactly. Given this historic crisis, we must confidently find our tongues.
Not that it stops there. It would be grotesquely vain to think it did. Improving public awareness means little without adequately supported mental health systems. But journalism can help. And right now, it will need to.
• Crisis support services can be reached 24 hours a day: Lifeline 13 11 14; Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467; Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800; MensLine Australia 1300 78 99 78; Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636
